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They looked for him everywhere but Matteo Messina Denaro played poker at least one evening a week. The discovery was made by the Carabinieri of the ROS and the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office who arrested the fugitive in January 2023. In the cell phones seized from Lorena Lanceri, one of Messina Denaro’s lovers sentenced to 13 years and 4 months for external complicity in association mafia, a group chat was found on WhatsApp entitled “Pokerino beverino” in which Messina Denaro participated, who however used the name of Francesco Salsi, and other people who participated in the evenings. The investigators are trying to understand if and which of the players present at the matches knew the true identity of the boss who, however, the woman had introduced to the group as the doctor Francesco Salsi.
In the chat there are numerous messages that the mafia boss exchanged with the participants with amused comments on the evenings spent together. We are in 2021. The players met, when the Covid bans were not in force, often at the home of Lanceri and her husband Emanuele Bonafede. In the “Pokerino beverino” group there is a photo sent to one of the participants, absent that day, which reads “the doctor is destroyed tonight”, a comment perhaps linked to the fact that Messina Denaro had lost.
